Threatening New Bill H.R. 1981 – Worse Than SOPA/PIPA – This Bill Entitled “The Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act Of 2011” Is A Bill With Overly Broadened Language That Greatly Threatens All Of Us.

H.R. 1981: Protecting Children From Internet Pornographers Act of 2011

Status: This bill was considered in committee which has recommended it be considered by the House as a whole. Explanation: Although it has been placed on a calendar of business, the order in which legislation is considered and voted on is determined by the majority party leadership. Keep in mind that sometimes the text of one bill is incorporated into another bill, and in those cases the original bill, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned. [Last Updated: Dec 17, 2011 6:15AM]

Computed from a Congressional Budget Office report by dividing the estimated cost of $1,000,000 by the U.S. population. The figure is extracted from the report automatically and may be incorrect. See the report for details.

See the Related Legislation page for other bills related to this one and a list of subject terms that have been applied to this bill. Sometimes the text of one bill or resolution is incorporated into another, and in those cases the original bill or resolution, as it would appear here, would seem to be abandoned.

An overzealous bill that claims to be about stopping child pornography turns every Web user into a person to monitor

Every right-thinking person abhors child pornography. To combat it, legislators have brought through committee a poorly conceived, over-broad Congressional bill, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011. It is arguably the biggest threat to civil liberties now under consideration in the United States. The potential victims: everyone who uses the Internet.

The good news? It hasn’t gone before the full House yet.

The bad news: it already made it through committee. And history shows that in times of moral panic, overly broad legislation has a way of becoming law. In fact, a particular moment comes to mind.

In the early 20th Century, a different moral panic gripped the United States: a rural nation was rapidly moving to anonymous cities, sexual mores were changing, and Americans became convinced that an epidemic of white female slavery was sweeping the land. Thus a 1910 law that made it illegal to transport any person across state lines for prostitution “or for any other immoral purpose.” Suddenly premarital sex and adultery had been criminalized, as scam artists would quickly figure out. “Women would lure male conventioneers across a state line, say from New York to Atlantic City, New Jersey,” David Langum* explains, “and then threaten to expose them to the prosecutors for violation” unless paid off. Inveighing against the law, the New York Timesnotedthat, though it was officially called the White Slave Traffic Act (aka The Mann Act), a more apt name would’ve been “the Encouragement of Blackmail Act.”

That name is what brought the anecdote back to me. A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of Blackmail by Law Enforcement Act. At issue is how to catch child pornographers. It’s too hard now, say the bill’s backers, and I can sympathize. It’s their solution that appalls me: under language approved 19 to 10 by a House committee, the firm that sells youInternet access would be required to track all of your Internet activity and save it for 18 months, along with your name, the address where you live, your bank account numbers, your credit card numbers, and IP addresses you’ve been assigned.

Tracking the private daily behavior of everyone in order to help catch a small number of child criminals is itself the noxious practice of police states. Said an attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “The data retention mandate in this bill would treat every Internet user like a criminal and threaten the online privacy and free speech rights of every American.” Even more troubling is what the government would need to do in order to access this trove of private information: ask for it.

I kid you not — that’s it.

As written, The Protecting Children from Internet Pornographers Act of 2011 doesn’t require that someone be under investigation on child pornography charges in order for police to access their Internet history — being suspected of any crime is enough. (It may even be made available in civil matters like divorce trials or child custody battles.) Nor do police need probable cause to search this information. As Rep. James Sensenbrenner says, (R-Wisc.) “It poses numerous risks that well outweigh any benefits, and I’m not convinced it will contribute in a significant way to protecting children.”

Among those risks: blackmail.

In Communist countries, where the ruling class routinely dug up embarrassing information on citizens as a bulwark against dissent, the secret police never dreamed of an information trove as perfect for targeting innocent people as a full Internet history. Phrases I’ve Googled in the course of researching this item include “moral panic about child pornography” and “blackmailing enemies with Internet history.” For most people, it’s easy enough to recall terms you’ve searched that could be taken out of context, and of course there are lots of Americans who do things online that are perfectly legal, but would be embarrassing if made public even with context: medical problems and adult pornography are only the beginning. How clueless do you have to be to mandate the creation of a huge database that includes that sort of information, especially in the age of Anonymous and Wikileaks? How naive do you have to be to give government unfettered access to it? Have the bill’s 25 cosponsors never heard of J. Edgar Hoover?

You’d thing that Rep. Steve Chabot (R-Ohio), who claims on his Web site to be “an outspoken defender of individual privacy rights,” wouldn’t lend his name to this bill. But he co-sponsored it! You’d think that the Justice Department of Eric Holder, who is supposed to be friendly to civil libertarians, would oppose this bill. Just the opposite. And you’d think that lots of tea partiers, with all their talk about overzealous government and intrusions on private industry, would object.

But they haven’t.

As Julian Sanchez recently wrote on a related subject, “In an era in which an unprecedented quantity of information about our daily activities is stored electronically and is retrievable with a mouse click, internal checks on the government’s power to comb those digital databases are more important than ever… If we aren’t willing to say enough is enough, our privacy will slip away one tweak at a time.”

This bill has nothing to do with child pornography. The government is trying to pass a law to track your PRIVATE DAILY BEHAVIOR on the Internet, and they are disguising it by trying to convince you it will stop child pornography. This bill is known as HR 1981, and was introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (note that this is the same representative who wrote the Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA).

Your ISP, or internet service provider (Comcast, Verizon, etc.) will be forced to, under government mandate, track every Internet activity you perform and associate it with your IP address (your computer, essentially), your NAME, your PHYSICAL ADDRESS, and your BANK ACCOUNT. This information will be archived for 18 months and can be accessed WITHOUT PROBABLE CAUSE.

This bill will also have NO IMPACT on child pornography whatsoever. The majority of child pornography distribution occurs on TOR networks: this means, simply, that all of the access is done anonymously and is UNTRACEABLE. The tracking mandated by this bill will have no effect on the child pornography industry because it will not be able to trace any of their behavior.

The hardcore tracking bits come from U.S. Code title 18 Part 1 Chapter 121 Section 2703

(2) A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the— (A) name; (B) address; (C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations; (D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and (F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),

(1) A governmental entity may require a provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service to disclose a record or other information pertaining to a subscriber to or customer of such service (not including the contents of communications) only when the governmental entity— …. (E) seeks information under paragraph (2).

(2) A provider of electronic communication service or remote computing service shall disclose to a governmental entity the— (A) name; (B) address; (C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations; (D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and (F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number),

(3) A governmental entity receiving records or information under this subsection is not required to provide notice to a subscriber or customer.

tl’dr: Whenever the government wants something, they get it. The only “new” bit is the IP address disclosure. If you don’t upvote this I fully expect you to repost it as much as possible.

EDIT: The time constraints are also altered thanks to jackerran for pointing this out.

Representative Zoe Lofgren, (D-Calif.) one of the most vocal opponents of the bill, presented an amendment to rename the Bill the “Keep Every American’s Digital Data for Submission to the Federal Government Without a Warrant Act.”